Godwin,

I think it's a great survey!  I hope we can all participate and see the results.  Boston Square Community Bikes is a relatively new program that can learn from your findings.

"Other than shop space, what services does your organization provide?"  could be rephrased to "What services does your organization provide?" with "open shop space/time" listed as one of the options.  I like the suggested additions to that question.

Can you ask respondents to prioritize services? ie:
"What do you consider your three most important services?"
"Rank you services by importance or investment of time or resources."
"What services would you like to offer but do not?"

Tom


Oakdale Neighbors
1260 Kalamazoo SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49507
www.oakdaleneighbors.org
616-248-2848


From: Godwin! <goodgodwin@hotmail.com>
To: The Think Tank <thethinktank@bikecollectives.org>
Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 2:31:02 AM
Subject: [TheThinkTank] Competitive analysis?

So, I have been tasked to perform a competitive analysis of similar organizations by an economist in our group. I'm realizing now that a genuine competitive analysis is probably not exactly what we need but a general survey on many of our shops may be useful to all of us. Since we are gearing up to lobby our university to support a DIY bike shop on campus again, our goal is to see what other similar organizations offer and what it takes to run them so that we can bargain reasonably. This data might also be useful for a number of other reasons to any bike collective.

I have put up a draft of a survey, please take a look. (I put this together pretty quickly, the ordering is probably not the best)

I am by no means an economist, so some of the terminology could probably be improved, same goes for US specific information. I would eventually like to offer up the data in such a way that any sensitive information could be untied from the organization information to keep information confidential, but I'm not sure of any other way than to simply query me after it is complete, I can also provide a relevant breakdown afterwards. I'm not sure if people would find giving information about income and expenditures too confidential even in that scenario.

If it interests you, I would like to hear back about a few things:
  • If you think I'm wasting my time
  • If you have any suggested amendments, improvements or additions of any questions or extraction of irrelevant or far too confidential questions
  • Suggestions for a host other than google forms

Thanks everyone,
.godwin of the Bike Root